Movie Review--Terminator: Dark Fate

"There once was a future in which humankind was hunted by a machine that could think and Terminators built to kill.  A future without hope.  That future never happened, because I stopped it."

--Sarah Connor, Terminator: Dark Fate


Terminator: Dark Fate stands alongside films like The Last Jedi in that it subverts expectations to the fury of vocal moviegoers while still managing to be a better movie than many recent entries in its own series.  This does not mean that it has no glaring mistakes or missed opportunities.  It is not that Dark Fate is the utter filmmaking abomination that many people are labeling it, but that it does not utilize the full potential it offers.  It does not reach the same heights of T2 even though the performances and action do elevate it far above Genysis.  At the very least, Dark Fate includes some genuine innovations, reclaiming some of the franchise's best qualities.  Everything from the reprisal of Linda Hamilton to the opening scene to the new take on the iconic theme music that accompanies the credits complements T2 even as Dark Fate departs from its predecessors dramatically.

Production Values

The opening scene of Dark Fate has already become extremely controversial for plot reasons, but the de-aging for Sarah and John Connor in the opening is some of the best that has been used in a major recent film.  Elsewhere in the film, the effects mostly hold up well, including the scenes where the Terminator played by Arnold Schwarzenegger has its face partially shredded yet again to show the metal beneath its skin and scenes of futuristic warfare against an alternate manifestation of Skynet.  As for the story, if one can get past the immense controversy around the first scene, the rest of the movie is much closer to the plot of the original films.

This means Dark Fate does revisit established story beats that will be familiar to fans of the first two installments, but, at the same time, it also introduces some new ideas.  One example is that the hostile Terminator's liquid metal can now separate itself from the endoskeleton and act as a second Terminator.  Another is the portrayal of a Terminator that chooses its own life after it fails to receive more orders from Skynet.  Characters Grace and Dani are among the new components of the film, complementing Linda Hamilton's much older Sarah Connor.  The strong characterization and philosophical themes of the original Terminator movies even survive--inconsistently.  Some characters were clearly given more to work with than others, even if the acting on the part of each lead cast member is superb.

One scene with Sarah well into the runtime is particularly well-executed, touching on the emotional toll she has taken in her war against Skynet.  Every other major character gets at least one comparable scene that cuts to the heart of their motivations and experiences, with Natalia Reye's Dani getting less development.  Her character is simply not as strongly explored as those of McKinzie Davis (Grace), Linda Hamilton, and Arnold Schwarzenegger.  Arnold's aged character is even able to use some great comedic lines without going into the more mainstream territory reserved for MCU-style movies.


Story

Major spoilers have to be included in any non-ambiguous description of the introductory scene.  If you want to avoid reading about a potentially shocking and unexpected event.

After Judgment Day is averted thanks to the events of Terminator 2, one of several additional Terminators not seen in T2 locates and kills the young John Connor.  Despite this, another Terminator is sent at a later date to kill a woman named Dani before she herself becomes the savior of humanity in a revised future.  In this future, Legion replaces Skynet, but several key things happen anyway.  Humanity is targeted by a (seemingly) sentient software that uses drones and Terminators to hunt survivors.  Augmented humans, people given cybernetic enhancements that impact their senses and combat ability, are used to fight Legion, and one of them visits the past to save Dani from a Legion machine.  Her journey to safety unites her with Carl, the T-800 who killed John, and also with Sarah, John's mother.


Intellectual Content

"Carl's" change of direction in his artificial life after fulfilling Skynet's prime directive directly touches upon the notion of an AI having free will.  Initial programming could certainly allow a sentient machine to make its own voluntary, free decisions without deterministic causal relationships in its circuitry negating its genuine choices.  Physical components are not consciousness, and it is implied that the Terminators, even though they are only modeled after biological humans, are indeed sentient.  The immateriality of human or AI consciousness (yes, it is nonphysical even if generated by physical objects) allows for free choices that in turn lead to certain thoughts or physical actions.  

Something the movie seems to brush up against without exploring it as directly as an AI's existential evolution is the concept of certain events occurring no matter what the rest of the timeline looks like, with different, or at least somewhat different, contexts and preceding steps setting them up.  For example, Skynet's Judgment Day was averted, but Legion still becomes Skynet's equivalent in the new future.  John may be removed from the timeline, but Dani becomes the new "Messiah" figure for humanity to rally behind.  X-Men: Days of Future Past brings attention to this very idea in a much more blatant way: through dialogue.  Terminator: Dark Fate might not even have even been made with this concept specifically in mind, no matter how much it seems to be the case, yet viewers could be prompted to consider the idea all the same.

However, there are no specific events that have to happen, as even the very act on the part of the uncaused cause of creating time and the cosmos could have been withheld by the uncaused cause.  No particular event at the start of a causal chain or timeline has to occur by necessity because it is always logically possible for the starting event--and whatever effects would have resulted--to have simply never been anything more than a mere possibility!  It is also possible for similar events to eventually play out regardless of what led to them.  The free will of millions of people could still bring about an alternate Judgment Day even if one person's decisions would have otherwise altered the future; there is no contradiction in the fact that a past event can have truly prevented a future catastrophe and the fact that an equivalent catastrophe could still occur for some other reason.

Conclusion

The only way for the series to avoid sheer repetition was to either stop focusing on John Connor or show a very different story that in some way involves him, and Dark Fate does the former.  This decision was for the best, although it was executed in a very controversial and unforseen way.  Thanks to its boldness and more thematically mature approach than that of Genysis, it is the only Terminator film that rivals the original two to the extent that it does.  The first movie is more groundbreaking, and the second is more existentially deep, but Dark Fate is still the best Terminator entry since T2.  Although it appears there will be no resurrection of the franchise following the financial failure of the film, it succeeds as a return to at least some of the themes and characters that made the first two movies masterpieces.


Content:
 1.  Violence:  Only a few scenes have blood, but the artificial skin covering both Arnold's Terminator and the newer model he fights is torn off onscreen to expose the machinery beneath.
 2.  Profanity:  "Bitch," "damnit," "shit," and "fuck" are heard.
 3.  Nudity:  When she first teleports from the future, Grace is naked, as is the series norm.  Her full unclothed body is shown from behind.  Gabriel Luna's Terminator also appears naked, but his lower body is always out of focus.